History That Doesn't Suck - Bonus: GTDS: NASA and the Commercialization of Space

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Following the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters, the government had to rethink space exploration. In 2006, NASA launched the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, allocating $500 million to encourage American entrepreneurs to develop cost-effective cargo and crew transport for the ISS. Today, private enterprises like SpaceX, Starlink, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab are ubiquitous. Yet none of this progress would be possible without substantial government assistance.Joining us is Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society and one of the world's foremost experts on NASA's budget and the political economy of space exploration. His data-driven analysis has been cited by The New York Times, POLITICO, The Washington Post, and NPR, and in 2025 he received a SpaceNews Icon Award for his work. Casey joins us to unpack what the data actually shows about the tradeoffs of commercial spaceflight — and what's at stake if the government cedes too much control.The government gets a bad rap. But the roads under your feet, the forecast on your phone, and the letter in your mailbox are all government too. Hosted by Professors Greg Jackson and Lindsey Cormack, Government That Doesn't Suck is a seriously researched, fact-driven podcast examining the dreams, machinery, and real-world impact behind American government, one episode at a time.

Hello, my friends. It's Professor Jackson, and I'm happy to share an episode of our new spin-off show, Government That Doesn't Suck. This new podcast has its own feed, which you can find on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. New episodes will be released every other Monday between new episodes of history that doesn't suck. This show is not a love letter to government. No, it's part history telling and part conversation about how things work or don't, and why. So give a listen to this episode. and then search for and follow government that doesn't suck in your favorite podcast app. Or go to hddspodcast.com. It's 325 in the afternoon, January 14th, 2004.

We're in the nine-story, glass-en-cased exterior NASA headquarters at 300 East Street, southwest Washington, D.C. Outside, there's an Arctic chill in the air as temperatures hover just above 30 degrees Fahrenheit. But here, inside NASA headquarters, the reception for President George W. Bush, is warm and inviting. It's a big day for the folksie commander-in-chief, one that will define how the United States approaches the future of space exploration. After getting to the moon at the behest of John F. Kennedy, the American Space Program has made some incredible achievements and endured unspeakable tragedy. Most notably, the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, and in 2003,

less than a year before this day at NASA headquarters, the explosion of the Columbia shuttle. With that in mind, the government wants to bring renewed focus and energy in our missions to the heavens. And today's presidential speech on January 14, 2004, is the first step on that journey. George Bush walks on stage to a thunderous applause, arriving to join NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe at the podium. Dubia, as this son of a former president, is affectionately called to distinguish him from his father, is smartly dressed in a crisp, dark suit with an American flag pinned on his lapel. After Sean delivers some opening remarks, he hands things over to the president. With Americans watching live on TV at home, George starts things off by telling everyone in the room how honored he is to be here and how they exemplify the country's greatest values.

Daring, discipline, ingenuity, and unity in the pursuit of great goals. America is proud of our space program. The risk takers and visionaries of this agency have expanded human knowledge, have revolutionized our understanding of the universe, and produced technological advances that have benefited all of humanity. And now, inspired by all that's come before, the president lays out his vision for the future. We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe,

to gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own. To achieve this, W.A. lays out three specific goals. Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. We will finish what we have started. We will meet our obligations to our 15 international partners on this project. We will focus our future research aboard the state,

on the long-term effects of space travel on human biology. I can only imagine what everyone listening to the live broadcast must be thinking. A whole new world of possibilities for scientific experiments and pushing human boundaries. But before we let our minds wander too much, the 43rd president has another step to tell us about. Our second goal is to develop and test a new spacecraft, the crew expiration vehicle, by 2008, and to conduct, to the first man mission no later than 2014. The crew exploration vehicle will be capable of ferrying astronauts and scientists to the space station after the shuttle is retired.

But the main purpose of this spacecraft will be to carry astronauts beyond our orbit to other worlds. Once those are in place, NASA will move on to the final piece of the puzzle. Our third goal is to return to the moon by 20th. as the launching point for missions beyond. Beginning no later than 2008, we will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research

and prepare for future human exploration. Using the crew exploration vehicle, we will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended period of time. Now, that last mark won't quite get hit, though Artemis 4 is scheduled to land astronauts back on the moon sometime in 2028. But in the immediate aftermath of George W. Bush's

rousing speech, Congress approves the $16.2 billion he asked for to kickstart that vision. Without a doubt, space exploration has grown and changed since President George W. Bush gave that speech 22 years ago. And not all of that change is how or what we expected. After the Challenger and Columbia disasters, it was clear that the government needed to rethink its approach to the stars. The president's goals of completing the International Space Station, or the ISS, for short, creating the crew exploration vehicle and the Artemis mission have all been achieved. But our present contains one major development not projected by W. The privatization of space. In 2006, NASA introduced commercial orbital transportation services, described by NASA as,

quote, a new era in spaceflight. Close quote. $500 million were allocated from NASA's budget for, to quote again, stimulating commercial enterprise in space by asking American entrepreneurs to provide innovative, cost-effective, commercial cargo and crew transportation services to the International Space Station. And six years later, in May 2012, the Space X Dragon made history as the first commercial spacecraft to bring a shipment to the ISS. Since that flight, private companies have become ubiquitous beyond our atmosphere. SpaceX, Starlink, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, the list goes on.

From taking Williams Shatner into ZeroG to bringing Internet access to people across the globe, space is becoming commercialized in ways that might have seemed impossible to George W. Bush and his contemporaries back at that 2004 Vision for Space Exploration speech. And none of it could have happened without a little or a lot of help from the government. Welcome to government that doesn't suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson. And I'm your professor, Lindsay Cormack. Today, I am so excited. We are talking to Casey Dreyer, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society. And something that I'm excited about to talk about with Casey is the idea that we have gone from a NASA that is predominantly run by the government,

funded by the government, operated by the government, to a space program that has some overlap with commercial space entities that are doing some of the heavy lifting for us. I'm also excited to talk to Casey because Casey, you have an approach that appreciates that government can do good things and oftentimes you bring people along in that. Can you start by telling us a little bit about what you do at the planetary society and how you see those interactions with government? There are aspects of government when it comes to space that is absolutely essential that the private sector or philanthropy will just never do and historically has never been able to do. primarily this is scientific space exploration. This is sending the Hubble Space Telescope up, right? There's long-term exploratory science with uncertain returns.

Perfect role for public investment. When you say we're sending the Hubble Space Telescope up, you're saying that something only government can do because no one commercial entity would be able to bear the costs up front, or why is that a thing that government can do? It comes down to the returns, right, in terms of this is fundamental scientific research. This is the predicate of our post-World War II era of the role of public investment in science. Fundamental research enabled by the public sector that may have spin-offs, it may have hardware value, there may be workforce benefits. But fundamentally, the outcomes, you know, no one is going to pay on a commercial sector for what's the atmosphere of Jupiter looking like today.

Where is the origins of the cosmos? This is fundamental curiosity-driven exploration science. and there's just no commercial market for that. We had a great test case of this in the United States before World War II. Ground-based telescopes and space exploration, you know, we can call it in those days, lagged behind Europe and other parts of the world that had royal astronomers. There was long-term efforts to try to build a U.S. infrastructure for astronomy that never panned out. And so we were left with private sector or philanthropist building ground-based space telescopes.

And they built a number of them, some of them pretty big and grand. there's Hubble himself, a Keck Observatory, these kind of wealthy titans of their time spending equivalence of hundreds of millions of dollars. And they would build these great instruments, but then they would never pay for anyone to use them. And that's also kind of the fundamental aspect of this, is that the aspect of building something as an individual tends to be as a monument or putting your name on it, and then you're less interested in running it, doing the actual day-in-day-out science. And this is what has been revolutionized by public investment in science, basically, again, since this post-war era.

Who do you credit giving the shift to for that? Who in the United States does finally get that kick started into, hey, we're lagging behind to, okay, now we're going to be leaders in this? Yeah, I mean, I think that really goes back to the whole World War II experience, right, where technology basically helped win the war. And the Vannevar Bush, who wrote Science, The Endless Frontier, one of my favorite founding documents of fundamental science policy, saying that fundamental science, exploratory science,

This uncertain outcome science, not applied science, is actually critical to the long-term health and survival of a nation, security of a nation, not just for public health, but also for, you know, they just come out of, if the Nazis had gotten the atom bomb, World War II would have gone very differently, right? Inventions of radar, other fundamental technologies, even things like penicillin in terms of treating troops, all of these types of fundamental investments fundamentally changed the U.S. relationship and this idea of this kind of growing and active federal government. He wrote this report to Roosevelt. Five years later, they created the National Science Foundation and then this kind of big flow of public funding into fundamental research that

then led to NASA and National Institutes of Health and other agencies came from that. So in the National Science Foundation, that's the topic that we're getting to later on in this season. In the way that this kickstart space, is it something where money then goes to universities or is money going to some other sort of industry partner or how does it get started. So space gets kind of, this is great. I love this story because it's this weird mix because space, particularly again, we're talking about mid-century, the U.S. through Operation Paperclip, got the Werner von Braun and the German rocket scientists that had created the V2 rocket. And they just let them play with it in the White Sands Deserts, Desert facility

for a couple of years in the late 1940s. Scientists from various parts of the country heard about this and realized you're sending rockets up, kind of glancing, they're not going into orbit, but they're kind of touching, you know, the edge of space. Maybe we should put something on those. What happens up there? What does it look like up there? And it was this kind of very organic realization that,

from pretty kind of modern, a lot of scientists, not coming from big established universities, but state universities, flight centers, NASA didn't exist at this time. So this was, you know, kind of inheritance of aeronautics research, information that they had been started to do through the war. And they started to put, what if we put a UV spectrometer that goes up on the top of a rocket and can look at the sun without having the atmosphere in the way. This was all kind of happenstance. And then it wasn't

really until the late 1950s where you had this intersection of kind of this Cold War growing paranoia, the invention of the atomic bomb by the Soviets, paired with the existence of ballistic missile or intercontinental ballistic missiles, suddenly the U.S.'s oceans weren't so big and protective anymore. And when Sputnik went up and it was a proxy for, hey, the Soviets could place any sort of heavy object over the United States at any moment within minutes. That's what kick started this.

And so it was fundamentally a government-driven initiative through a national security lens that really started the space program. And because of that hardware requirements, it's very difficult to go into space, right? A rocket is a controlled explosion that's pointing down. Anything goes wrong even a little bit. You don't have a rocket anymore. You have pieces everywhere.

Space itself was so unknown. There was no viable and no pathway, really viable pathway at all, for private sector individuals to go into space or to support that program at the beginning. It was fundamentally a government-driven initiative. And then also, it seems like it's really costly. Like, it seems like at the start, it takes a lot of money to get any of this off the ground, literally. Well, it depends what you mean by costly. So this is where I always like to, I mean, the entire Apollo program. So one of the things that I've done I published research on is building out, rebuilding the cost of Apollo using, you know, very detailed analyses and inflation adjustment.

Today's dollars, it cost about 350 billion to do Apollo, right? And that was from the start of Apollo in 1961 through the end of Apollo in 1973. $350 billion is about what the United States spent in 1969 in Vietnam. Right. So in terms of what we're spending, it's a lot of money to you and me, but in terms of what the government is spending elsewhere, modest. Apollo is not, I'm not saying Apollo is cheap, but it's also, we have to see that in context. Eisenhower, when he started NASA, when he signed the legislation to law and the agency kind of came into existence in 1958, he was very hesitant to go for a big moon program. He wanted a more modest program.

And this is where they really started to push. What about the uncrewed, the robotic scientific missions? those are comparatively cheaper. You don't have to bring them back. You don't have to bring a bubble of earth with you out into space. You can do actual science with them. There's a huge, at its core, and has continued through the history of NASA, this tension and discussion between how much should we invest in human spaceflight, which is more expensive because you have those higher requirements and robotic stuff, which have much more practical things, but tend to kind of trigger the national geopolitical aspects less, right? They engage in that a little less.

effectively. And so Eisenhower won a very modest space program. He didn't approve a big human spaceflight effort. He just had little test program with Mercury. It was John F. Kennedy kind of coming in after the failure of the Bay of Pigs needing a big turnaround in U.S. policy and his domestic policy. Yergaheran had just gone into space looking for, and they have memos of this, like, can we do something in space to show up the Soviets? Going to the moon was kind of the only way to do that, to start both from zero, and that's really set this expectation of what NASA does. And it was, you know, again, expensive compared to doing basic rocketry or scientific activities. But again, in the scope of what government spends, it's pretty modest. And I think something else that you pointed

out is like, if we compare this to military sort of spending at the time, it also is surprising to me that Eisenhower specifically didn't make NASA some sort of military agency, didn't say, like, you know, anyone who's ever fought in a war knows that you want to have the high ground, what higher ground than space? And instead it seems like for most of our history of space exploration, it's been under the idea that it's going to be peaceful, internationally oriented, and something that's going to benefit all of humanity. Do you feel like that has stayed the same, or are there changes that appear in sort of that ethos? I think for NASA, it's largely stayed the same. And that's a really core insight that I think is really important that there's this. And I think there's a broader public, maybe misconstitutional. that there's this tight integration or that it's all one big aerospace industry. And part of it is, you know, it's not completely false. You have big contractors like Boeing or Lockheed Martin that do both.

But NASA is chartered and was intended to be. And I think this really came out of that Cold War era activity, which was we don't want space. You know, we can go into space. We can develop big rockets, which we could put, you know, nuclear weapons on, but we're not, right? So it's a, it's both simultaneously, it's a symbol and a proxy for capability, but they didn't want it to be provocative at the same time. You don't want to make the Cold War worse. And so you explicitly make NASA distinct from the Defense Department and make it its own civilian run, civilian managed. This was very important to Eisenhower and others at the time in order to make NASA, in a sense, also a projection of U.S. values, right? This openness that NASA explicitly will do its

tests in the open compared to Soviets who would only announce a success after it had succeeded and not mention the failures, that it would share information openly with the world, scientific information from the probes that the United States pays for is shared freely with anyone else in the world once the data comes back. And it was designed to kind of, again, you have to see it in this Cold War context that set these values. But again, those values have stayed, and I think it's actually one of the reasons that NASA has remained popular up to a certain point within the political class and members of Congress and others that see it as this American symbol that can then be presented forward to the rest of the world.

Something that I did in preparing to talk to you about this is I looked at how members of Congress were talking about space exploration. And what I found is that within the Republican conference, there's actually far more chatter about space exploration than in the Democratic Caucus. And my sort of guess on this is that when we, think about where bases and production facilities are for these, they tend to be represented by Republicans. Is that something that you have any insights on or thoughts on? Indeed, it is. I actually just did an article about this for our magazine, The Planetary Report, and it's some analysis I've been working on that I hope to publish later this year. If you look at the actual

representation, so NASA's spread out into 10 different centers across the country. When NASA was created, they kind of just pulled a variety of, like the, oh, the Redstone Missile Arsenal from Alabama, Well, now that's the NASA Center. They pulled some aeronautics and flight research areas. Okay, that's part of NASA, too, right, the first day in NASA aeronautics. Then they also, as Apollo happened, they said, well, we need to build rocket testing facilities. We need to build a, at the time, they called that a manned spaceflight center, but now it's called Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston.

Where would they build those? Well, at the time, it was Southern Democrats dominating the appropriations chairs in the U.S. Senate, and that kind of Southern Democrat through and with also Democratic leadership in the White House, kind of mixed with their Southern strategy to build up infrastructure and lift up the economic fortunes of the U.S. South kind of dovetailed together. And so all the new NASA base centers that existed that were built for Apollo, they're all in the U.S. South, Texas, expanding out in Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, so forth. And so we've had this political inversion during that time, right from the 1960s to now, that functionally flipped the control of those, representation of those areas from Democrat to Republican,

I should say, to your point. And at the same time, the two science centers, so the NASA centers that really do a lot of science, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, for people really paying attention. It's an FFRDC, a federal funded research and development center, not a full NASA Center, but we'll call it that one for now. And the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Those became more democratic. And so there's actually been the ideology of the representation of these NASA centers by science

and the ones that do human spaceflight have diverged over time, or actually the most divergent that they have ever been right now. And so I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing. So space isn't inherently partisan as an issue, but it's becoming parochially partisan. Sure, in the sense that it's like you can bring dollars, back to your sort of base, investment in your community, jobs for people who live there, that makes sense to me. Yeah, it's old school. It's like, it's a throwback politics. Because it's not hyperpartisan,

you can still have the old, this kind of, what you said, just like it's dollars and cents into our districts. And that has been a great help, a hindrance sometime for what NASA has done, but that's the defining political issues is that parochialism still. And just because the larger sorting of our political system, it has become. particularly with human spaceflight, much more of a Republican parochial issue than a Democratic one. This is something that I'm really glad to chat with you because you do have a handle not only on like the technical history and the how to of space exploration, but you also have a really close handle on the like what the politics are behind the scenes, how you can influence policy yourself. But I want to put a pin in that and go back to sort of working through a timeline, which is we have Apollo, we decide to do it because it's hard, not because it's easy, we succeed, we get on the moon. And then there's sort of this moment of like, okay, what next?

And in a simple read of it, it's like, well, we're going to go for some sort of shuttle system. We're going to be flying around space and doing things. And then eventually we get to the ISS. And then there is always talk about Mars. In your sort of understanding of this, what is the movement from Apollo to the shuttle to the ISS and why does Mars get left out? So that's a lot. Feel free to run with it.

Yeah. And interrupt me at any point, please. But no, I mean, this is such a fascinating story, all of this, because there's this. concept called a paradigm called the von Braun paradigm. So, you know, Verna von Braun, our German rocket scientist, ex-Nazi, who came to the United States and led the rocket development program in Alabama, helped build the Saturn 5 rocket that took astronauts to the moon. His whole, you can go back to him in the 19, as a kid in the 1920s. He was a sci-fi. He's kind of this Elon Musk era, like sci-fi fan who sees this inevitable future for humanity in the stars. And he was

working in rocket clubs when he was in his 20s. And then he worked with the Nazis, arguably because, hey, they'll fund my rocket research. I'll just look the other way on these other things. He was kind of an opportunistic individual. He intentionally gave himself up to the Americans because he thought they would support his rocket research better. He was savvy about that and they did. But he was during the 1940s when before the big space age had started, he wrote popular sci-fi books about the Mars project, about humanity's destiny at Mars. And the way that we build out this big path to Mars is you build a reusable shuttle

that will take you to a space station that then you can build a moon base and then from there you can build a base on Mars. And so it was always seen as this, you know, you get down the cost of going into space through a reusable shuttle to a station to the moon to Mars. He's kind of like stepwise out. That's kind of the rough von Braun paradigm.

And Apollo kind of mixed up that plan Because it was always, you know, going to the moon is hard. And it's dangerous. It does take a lot of resources for space. And but because of this unique mix of geopolitical factors and political, just internal domestic political factors that came together at the right moment that kicked off Apollo. Apollo kind of jumped the cue, right? And we went to the moon first.

It sounds like it's part three. It's like, that was the third part. Exactly. And so Apollo kind of happened faster than anyone ever thought it would. And so when it was time to say, what do we do after Apollo? This thing called the Space Task Group, led by Vice President Spiro Agnew at the time. This is under Richard Nixon, sat with Von Braun and a bunch of other luminaries and NASA representatives and say, okay, what do we do? Well, they took that budget line they had for Apollo and just kept drawing it forward and say, okay, we'll do our reusable shuttle and station next.

And then we'll build, you know, this moon base from Apollo and then we'll go to Mars. And so this was this big project. And it's like, well, if you keep it at Apollo levels, we can probably get to Mars by the late 1990s. But if you up it a little bit, you know, we could probably get to Mars by the mid-80s. Nixon saw that and did the equivalent of laughing them out of the room. I mean, this is Nixon by this time was not that interested in space. He was worried that Apollo 13 had spooked him. He thought it would hurt his reelection chances if there was a disaster while Apollo was happening.

He wasn't impressed by all the stuff that they were doing. doing anymore. There's a period between, you know, at the beginning of his presidency, he had that Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8 astronauts hanging in the Oval Office. By the time Apollo 15 was rolling around, it had disappeared. Right. This is kind of this interesting symbol of how he'd lost it. And so he wanted to start cutting. But all the while, my understanding is that Nixon really held astronauts in high regard, like sort of thought about them as like heroic frontiersmen of the American experiment. He did, but not enough to keep sending him to the moon. So he just, all that he wanted to do. So, I mean, this was a situation.

they were cramming down. NASA lost, you know, from its peak, lost about two-thirds of its budget in about five years. And his budget office kept cramming them their budget down, so they had to start canceling Apollo missions. To the point was there was a discussion, do we even do human spaceflight at all? And that's where Nixon's love of astronauts came in and said, look, we have to keep astronauts.

I don't want to be the president who stops Americans from going into space. But we can't do all this, you know, you've had your fun boys, was kind of the attitude. Now it's time to be reasonable. And so the compromise was that he agreed to start the development of the space shuttle as a way, as this, say, if we do it for a certain price, then it will lower the cost of spaceflight, then maybe we can build a space station. But we're not going to build the station now. We're just going to build the shuttle. And so the whole design process, you moved away from this kind of geopolitical, goal-oriented space program to a, what can we do with the money we're allowed to have?

and you created a capability without a purpose, which was the space shuttle. The other thing that was convenient for Nixon was that at the time, California was, you know, a purple state, as we would call it now. And keeping a bunch of aerospace jobs in Southern California, which is where all the shuttle contracts went, was good for him for his reelection purposes in 1972. And so the shuttle was basically moved forward as this compromised approach to kind of keep aspects of human spaceflight going, but to know, longer go for these big leaps and technological advances. Okay, so when we get to this shuttle discussion, what is it that we think it's going to cost, and then is there a difference between what it actually costs? So, interestingly, the cost was set by the Bureau of the Budget at the time, now the Office

of Management and Budget, as roughly, I think it was $5.2 billion in 1972. dollars. It cost exactly $5.2 billion when it was finally finished in according to accounting purposes in in 1982. But they shifted what happened was, is then they shifted all the stuff that should have been development onto ongoing operational costs that created really high operating costs for the space shuttle at the time. What do you mean by that? It's like this was going to be capital to fund like the actual building of it, but then it gets pushed. Yeah, or think about it as like operational design. So they had hoped to initially make a space shuttle as a two-state, fully reusable rocket, where you would launch a space shuttle up and it would land itself, and the booster would fly back down, not fly back down, but splash into the ocean.

They'd recover it. You ended up having it be partially reusable in order to save upfront development costs, right? So you didn't have to make a large new booster. You had this big fuel tank that was always discarded. It just became a much more complex system in order to keep the development costs down. at the cost of ongoing long-term operation cost, right? So it undermined the intent of keeping, lowering the cost of spaceflight

in order to lower the cost of its development. When they're talking about this, is there like some sort of metric where they say, you know, every time we take the shuttle up, it's going to cost $200 million, or what's the sort of like ongoing notion of how much it costs each time you use a shuttle? So the shuttle, I'm trying to remember this off the top of my head,

but the shuttle, you can say on average, the shuttle cost about $5 to $6 billion a year to operate. And that was pretty much a fixed cost. It didn't matter if you launched at nine times or if you launched at two times. There's a big standing army of people who got paid either way that would facilitate, refurbish all this stuff with the space shuttle. And they could never really get that down. They tried to get that down much.

And obviously, the more you would fly it, the lower your marginal cost rate would be. But when they really tried to push that, you had the Challenger disaster. Right before that, it flew nine times in a year. that was its peak flight rate. Early studies of the shuttle said it should be flying 24 times every two weeks, basically. When you say early studies, is this like stuff that we use to pitch it? Or was it like, where did that? This is stuff in the 1970s saying, you know, this is why it's going to be so great.

There's one independent study that NASA technically didn't do, but they said it'll launch 50 times a year, right? Every week launches will cost $20 million or something like that. But in retrospect, nothing is cheaper when you have humans in a spacecraft. right? Because you have to keep them alive. You have to keep them safe. You have to bring them back. That just adds hideous amounts of complexity. And this, this, this, basically this mismatch between ambition and what the government funded, right, about kind of kneecapping the development ability to do really straight, like big, bold things. You say, no, it will never cost more than this to make. And so NASA kind of, okay, we'll slot in what we can into this. And they gave a lot of compromises during that development. They also would do things like they reached up. to the Defense Department to say, hey, is this relevant to you? And the defense department, well, maybe if it does this, and they said, okay, it does this now. And Defense Department never used it, but that added, it made the shut a lot bigger and heavier than it originally was planned to be. And so it added further costs, right, operational costs.

So they gave a lot of, it became a very compromised political process to keep this system going that had been established through Apollo. And without, again, without a lot of focus and intent on what are we going to do with it. And that kind of mired, you know, you can kind of see after that why we had a space station that came in 1984 with Reagan's address to Congress, sorry, address to Congress, State of the Union speech where he announced space station freedom at the time is what it was called. And because what it did is it justified having a space shuttle. Space shuttle was built to build a space station. So you're kind of instead of doing these projects in parallel, you're linearizing them and doing them one after another. But then the space station says, okay, well, we have to use whatever we've now built with the shuttle, and it better fit within that. And that became its own kind of long-term development issue that we can talk about if you want.

You're saying in the sense that there's only so much space that we can put things in to take it up to... Okay, okay. And so if it were optimized differently, you're saying those things might have been planned at the same time so that you could build a vessel that can take the pieces that are requisite to building it. Yeah, or just design the two things in accordance with each other. Like, what are our needs? for a space station because once there's a lot of this big and I want to emphasize here, we're really talking about the human spaceflight side of NASA. There's a whole other parallel NASA science side that rarely has any of these problems because science questions are in a sense you can all agree on what your major science questions are. If you get enough scientists in a room, what are the biggest science questions of the day, enough time passes, you can at least get a rough

kind of agreement on, okay, these three things are like the big unknowns. That drives the program of science, you have uncrewed or robotic spacecraft to do that for you, and you execute on those. Human spaceflight, after Apollo, without that geopolitical reason, never had this kind of forcing function of what is our priority. What are we trying to do? And so for the longest time, NASA was building capabilities, and then when it came time to define what they would do, they could never agree on it. And they tried to make it do everything. And then it kind of did everything not very well for human spaceflight. So it's a fundamental difference in kind of how we are, what are we doing with a human spaceflight and science programs? And they are really truly honestly distinct. Most of the vast majority of science at NASA is done by the robotic spacecraft, very, very little. That stuff is like much less in the public imagination in the sense that we don't have a human story. We don't see this. And I think this might sort of bring us to an inflection point, which is when the challenger explodes. So, Jan 28, 1986, I'm born the next day.

So that day is like always with me in sort of my history. My guess is that in seeing the sort of heartbreak of how this sort of like well-planned system in a foiable human enterprise might go wrong really changes our capacity to want to fund this more. Was that the case or was it something where people were like, you know what? No, we have to put more money into it and figure out how to do it better. I'd say it's broadly the latter. and but with an important correction, an important kind of first part of what you were saying is part of that is it made actually

the language and politics around human spaceflight even more kind of grand and ineffable, right, and becoming less, ironically, less practical. So Challenger was, the astronauts died carrying a commercial satellite. So we want to talk about commercialization later. It actually starts in 1984 with the Commercial Space Act passed by Congress, and it was a big initiative within the Reagan administration to say that, We should have Unleash American Entrepreneurship into space. And the space shuttle, it's your delivery truck.

So we're going to start selling commercial launch opportunities on the NASA-run space shuttle. It will be a NASA, and it was actually designated as the single launch vehicle for the entire United States. So all other rocket lines were scrapped, including for the Department of Defense. Everything would launch on a shuttle because the shuttle had to launch a lot, so therefore, It's one of those kind of strange political, circular political decisions. So let me pause you there. When you say that they're offering that to commercial entities, is this for people who are trying to build satellite systems for communication or navigation, or is that what it is? Yes. So at this time, it's primarily communication. So communication satellites were just starting to become commercialized in the 1980s.

And there was experiments with commercializing Lansat, kind of Earth observation in this period as well. And so they were seeing this potential as very, very small market at this point, very theoretical. But communications was always and remains, actually, the one actual market in space is things that go up and point back down so it can bounce off messages that we send to each other. Like that's basically the primary marketplace for space assets. And after Challenger, they said, these astronauts died carrying what? They died carrying a commercial asset. Like, was that worth their lives? And so that actually started to diverge again, where the shuttle was now reserved only for important national priorities like the Hubble Space Telescope or eventually the International Space Station pieces that would launch.

And all commercial stuff was shunted over into uncrewed launch vehicles. So this is where you recreated your military run rockets, the Atlas 5 and the Delta series. And those would be the things that would carry, you know, commercial assets into space. Okay, so that does sort of like then do this different sort of splitting trajectory of things. When we're moving from like shuttle to international space station, how does that debate go down? Like who are the big players who are saying, we want this? Is there anyone who says like, no, this is a waste of our money or like, what's happening behind the scenes as that gets kicked off? Yeah, I mean, so this is where you see this kind of institutional inertia, right?

So I mentioned this whole space task group and even the Von Braun paradigm, this idea of, I mean, you could, It's 2001 of Space Odyssey. What does the main character do at the first half of the movie? He gets onto a space plane run by Pan Am and goes to a space station, right, before going to the moon. So this idea, you know, the 1950s collier's articles that first popularized space to the American public space stations, right? So the space station was seen as an inevitable next step by NASA and the people who really into space. And the shuttle, it was the post hoc justification for having. a space shuttle. A space shuttle was made to build a space station. And so it became this institutional

focus of NASA to try to secure a space station. And basically, as soon as the shuttle moved out of this development period into what they would call operations at that time, they started pushing really hard. And that's when Reagan administration approved it. It immediately because building a station is hard, what do you actually want to do there? It's worth a little digression. If you'll forgive me, which is this idea. The way that we talk about space, I think it's really interesting because we talk about space as if it's this uniform thing. When really it's like talking about the ocean.

And if you could, you know, you can, so you can kind of replace space and ocean sometimes and it brings it like if you say, well, why do we go to the ocean? Well, I don't know. There's a lot of reasons to do it. Like, are you a commercial fisherman? Are you going for leisure? Are you going on a boat cruise? Are you going to study the Marianas Trench or something like that?

Like there's a million reasons to do it. but there's no single reason that you go to the ocean because the ocean is this vast place. And space is even bigger. It's literally infinite, right? And so when we talk about we're going to go to space as like, well, we need a single justification. It's this, I think, category error because it really depends on what you want to do. That's just a big place. There's lots of different things to do there.

And so when NASA was first talking about we need a space station, well, what do you do? Well, you can kind of do anything you want. So how do you kind of find agreement? And this is that kind of coalition issue where human spaceflight just doesn't have these forcing functions that drive consensus about what the activity and output should be because it's fundamentally symbolic driven activity. And so for the space station, it's the same stuff we're talking about now. Well, we'll make novel materials in zero gravity, zero G. We'll study human health. we'll service satellites in orbit.

Maybe we'll have a space telescope that will point at the ground and look. And it turns out that when you actually start to do the work and make those things happen, a lot of those are kind of orthogonal to each other in reality. Like you can't have a hardware and satellite servicing place on your space station

if you want to have a precisely pointed and perfectly still space telescope pointing at distant objects for weeks at a time, right? Because the vibrations from one will jiggle the other. I'm glad you said that Because I was like, is that because something's going to jostle it around? Yeah, exactly, right? It's like they become completely distinct.

And also, I'd argue that a lot of the vision of human spaceflight about what humans should do in space is firmly entrenched in mid-20th century ideas of the centrality of humans in technology. Most of this kind of vision of space, particularly with humans, was created before we had computers. Right? And so. Well, this is something we talked about the other week where I was like, the Apollo mission gets, kicked off before we have pocket calculators. Like, the idea that we're going to do this precedes rolling suitcases in airports.

And I was like, that's wild to me. The, one of the most, I think, generous and beneficial investments of the Apollo program itself was miniaturization of the flight computer, of the, like, into, from a room into a shoebox. And that was itself, that was done at MIT. That was a roughly off the top of my head,

$20 billion R&D project to try to miniaturize that to make that work. And it, you know, it, and it has less RAM. It's like 20K of RAM or it's like this insane small amount of computing power that they had to work with, but it was revolutionary at the time, right? And I think the difference is

is that you see these early ideas of what a space station is and they're all human tended because there's this, there's zero idea that a computer could run things for us, that humans wouldn't be in the loop somewhere. And this kind of human centralization of our ego, in a sense, and our vision of how we must be a part of this, means that when you have humans alive in a place, it's actually kind of undermines the ability to do effective science

because, again, you're breathing, you're sweating, you're exhaling CO2, you know, you have to take showers, you know, we do all the things that humans do that we have to deal with. And that tends to get in the way of just doing the work. And then we have now very capable automated systems like the Mars rovers that are, you know, can drive for hundreds of meters themselves on the surface of Mars. for hundreds of times less than it would cost to put humans there, right? But at the end of the day, the space station kind of for a while fell apart, was falling apart as is programmatically because it was, the budget was growing.

It's becoming more complex as they really thought about it. Well, and are we also having to negotiate with Russia or other international players on this? So this is what saves it, actually. So this is where you bring back geopolitics once again to save the human spaceflight program. because the Soviet Union collapses between the time of the announcement of Space Station freedom and then also the start of the Clinton administration. And so you had this post-Cold War period where suddenly you had two issues. You had Soviet Union opening up, or now Russia opening up, but also financially collapsing. And so all of their rocket engineers suddenly needed jobs and did the U.S. want them to stay in Russia or maybe take a job at North Korea?

make building ICBMs for them or Iran or whatever kind of threatening country you can imagine at the time. Also by so that there became this U.S. policy of investing in Russian aerospace in order to keep that both contained but also give insights into their capability. And it became this kind of post-war, post-cold war symbol of unity that and this is where so space station was refashioned into the, what we know now is the international space station with the Russian rocket capability. and engineering capability designing some of the core segments. And actually the first segments launched into space were a Russian segment. So that's really

what gave it purpose. And it was because of that, that it actually survived. I mean, it was politically pretty uncertain for a while. It survived a vote to cancel it or to strip it out of funding authorization legislation

in the U.S. House of Representatives by one vote in 1993. So it was very much touch and go. But once it happened, it's now kind of untouchable, right? I'll be surprised if they ever let it die programmatically for these parochial reasons that you talk about.

So it was really in this 1990s, it became recharged with this geopolitical purpose, post-war Cold War symbolism. First pieces were launched in 99, operational by, well, you had people staying on it, I think, in 2001. And is it meant for two people or is there another number of people

that are meant to be on it? It can hold up to 12, I think, at a time. Okay. So there's a U.S. segment and a Russian segment I think any I think the most that they've had up there is roughly 12 I think on average there are six to eight total okay so it's normally manned by a handful of people or a little bit more yeah and it's been continuously occupied since so it's actually the longest time that a human heartbeat has been in space as NASA likes to say like for many people their entire lives

there's been someone in space anyone born I guess after 2000 has been someone in space that's an interesting way to think about it I think that also might be a good sort of point where we can start to pivot. If you were born earlier, you probably think of space exploration as something that is exclusively the pursuit of a government, whether it be our government or the USSR. And then I think if you were born maybe after 2000, it sort of looks like something that private commercial enterprises take the lead in. And that's like where we see, you know, videos of rockets going, bases being, you know, used to land rockets. And so when does that sort of thing really change. My guess is it's around 2006, but is there another, like with,

I think it's called Cots. Is that what it's called? What does that stand for? The commercial orbital transportation system. Okay. And so also a play on commercial off the shelf, uh, uh, in, in government procurement parlance. So it was a pun internally. They like that. There's also a program called C3PO, um, commercial crew and cargo procurement office or something like that. I'd forget big like that. So they, NASA likes her little puns with this. But yeah, it was roughly around then. So SpaceX starts in 2002, I think, from Elon Musk.

And, you know, this is a very different Elon Musk than we know now. He's got PayPal money, but he's far from a billionaire. And he starts Tesla, or he joins Tesla a few years later. His story is that, you know, he kind of looked up plans of what's NASA's Mars plans and didn't see any? And he's like, what? So I'm going to build my own rocket. You know, it was always kind of his stated goal. but it was really in

2005, 4, 5, and 6. And so that's when, so at this point, NASA was kind of recovering from the second shuttle disaster. We have to talk about Columbia then, right? Because Columbia is 2003. And so SpaceX, I didn't realize SpaceX precedes Columbia. And then there is sort of maybe like a perfect storm of we got to figure out a different way to do it.

Yeah, I mean, so what happened with Colombia or the consequences of Columbia were, so the shuttle at this point had been flying for more than 20 years. And Columbia revealed that there is a fundamental, non-fixable design flaw to the space shuttle. It is inherently dangerous, which is, you know, you think about rockets. Most of the things sit on the top of the rocket, space shuttle sat on the side, right? It's really weird. And there's a number of reasons, again, kind of going back to these design compromises, NASA had to make in the 1970. When you say sat on the side, you're saying the shuttle is here, the rocket that is propelling is next to it instead of

top, bottom. Exactly, right. Okay. And so, yeah, you have your big boosters on here, and then the shuttle kind of sits on the side. It's a really unique and beautiful rocket configuration. There's nothing else like it. But there's a reason most people don't do that, because when you're a rocket going up, you drop things. So the big fuel tank for the space shuttle holds liquid hydrogen.

It's incredibly cold. It's like negative 400 degrees. So they have a ton of this foam insulation that they had to put on this giant fuel tank. The spacecraft itself, when you fill it with these hyper-cold propellants, they tend to condense from the hot Florida humid air, ice on the sides of these rockets and other things. It all kind of shed off. Remember the launch of Apollo 13 movie, like all the things kind of dropping off the rocket. But it was really, in this case, the foam from that big central tank,

sometimes it gets brittle or cold or old or worn and a chunk can fall off. And in this case, a chunk fell off. And as the shuttle was accelerating up, it hit, you know, a part of its wing, just hard enough to create a little dent in that wing that when it was reentering the atmosphere allowed this super hot plasma from your reentry into the inside of the space shuttle

and caused its breakup. And so the fact is, though, like, that's where you put stuff on top. So with your shedding all that stuff, it's not hitting you. You're sitting above it. But the shuttle had that design flaw. So that revealed, again, fundamentally,

there is a failure mode to this mission, this spacecraft that cannot be fixed. So I'm glad you're saying that there's this like fundamental technical problem because I think in some popular imaginations, people would say it's like a cultural problem, like a NASA's sort of approach to not desiring to say like it's our fault. Well, I mean, it's certainly both. And I think there is operational lessons you get from it because they saw it impact. I mean, that NASA saw it hit.

I mean, there's actually frankly nothing that could have done beyond maybe trying to scramble and launch a second space shuttle, but that's almost impossible to do that quickly. And that was certainly the problem in the Challenger era too, right? That they're taking risks in order to hit a flight rate that is not feasible. And when you take risks, you know, sometimes bad things will happen. So this isn't to exculpate NASA entirely, but there is, I mean, the point is, though, that it revealed that at the end of the day, the shuttle has a design flaw and it should not keep going.

And so this is under George W. Bush. And so this kicked off this whole George W. Bush is called vision. I wonder how many people remember this besides me. The VSE, the vision for space exploration. This is George W. Bush saying, we're going to go back to the moon. We need a goal again. We need to have purpose and human spaceflight again. And as part of that, we need to retire the shuttle. As soon as it finishes assembling the international space station, we retire the shuttle. You take all that money you save from not running the shuttle more. You put it into new moon rockets, new lunar landers, and we'll be back on the moon by 2020. That was a constellation program. So they

had the situation where the official policy was we're now pivoting towards the moon. But we'll have a space station, but without a shuttle to give it cargo, right? Because you have a space station, you need air and water and food and scientific equipment and whatever you want to do. It has to be brought up there continuous. Not to even to mention people. You just need cargo. And so NASA didn't have any money. I mean, this is also when the Iraq war happened. And so suddenly NASA's promised budget kind of evaporated for all this new stuff. And NASA said, okay, well, We don't have a space shuttle here in a few years. We're focusing on the moon.

Going to orbit, that should be kind of straightforward by now. What if we have some kind of commercial partner? What if we just pay for a delivery service for cargo to the space station? That was cost, this commercial orbital transportation approach. And so the trick was, and this is what was completely different in novel, was like, NASA, we will give you a fixed amount of money. We will not own the hardware. We will pay you then for deliveries. if you win, like if you pass kind of a series of milestones and show that you can do this,

you'll get a big fat contract to resupply the space station for the next 10 years, right, worth billions of dollars. And so wait, when you say NASA will give you a fixed amount of money, wasn't it also the case that whoever was competing for this had to bring their own money to the table to? Yes. It was, and it's nearly matched. Yeah. So they had to raise substantial private funding on their own side. So that was a requirement of.

And that was actually one of the reasons, one of the, you know, I think they had chosen three initial companies. One of them was removed from the competition because they couldn't raise that private funding. This one has a kind of a funny name, right? The one that I'm forgetting it, the one that gets removed. Yes. And I'm also. Okay, great. So we'll remember it and then say. They haven't done much, they haven't done much sense. But the other one was at the time orbital space, orbital sciences, which is now part of Northrop Grumman, which did succeed. They actually have a rocket that no one knows about. But SpaceX was one of those companies. NASA put in about, half the money to develop what is now the Falcon 9 rocket, this medium lift rocket capability, SpaceX put in the other half. When you say the half, what's the total? I think NASA put in around $400 million, $396 million is what NASA contributed for that

development portion. And then SpaceX has to bring its own like $450 to the table or something? Plus anything else, right? So that was the deal. Like if you have to bring in a substantial amount and then, hey, don't come back to us if you need more money, right? And that was always the problem, right? that you're, and the reason is, you know, you don't want to put companies out of business to bid on a

moonlander that no one has ever built before in human history, right? So it would, you say, okay, here's what you think it's going to cost. We understand this is hard. Oh, it's going to cost more. This weird thing happened. Okay, you know, there's incentives to not do that, right? You get bonuses if you don't go over your budget, but fundamentally the taxpayer is on the hook. This is the whole kind of contracting thing that incentivizes on, say, you know, kind of expensive, bloated space projects. And so this was an attempt to kind of, you know, And this is George W. Bush, so this is kind of fitting into that. Wait, hold on. You just said something. When you say incentivizes bloated space projects,

what do you mean by this? So when you have what's called a cost plus contract that you pay cost plus overruns, the contractor that is delivering this project to you does not have an incentive to stay on budget, right? They'll make more money over time if it goes, if it runs over. And it's not like they're necessarily intentionally doing this or anything. It's just that you need to deliver. something that has to work. So it's, why not just put all the money up front? And, you know, they know the program officers at NASA and they say, okay, well, you know,

it's going to cost more than then we thought it was going to be. It's more complicated than we thought. Members of Congress like to direct funding based on where things are located, right? So you're hiring lots of, you know, just have lots of people and, you know, kind of this big standing army that fed the space shuttle kind of contract was a very big political focus. And so it was just a, it's a incentive structure that does not, incentivize delivering on cost, right? And so the argument was, if you can shift that incentive to say, if you go over budget, you're paying for that, not me. And I'm going to cancel you.

And if you can't do it, then fine, you're gone. That shifts that incentive. And that's kind of what was the ethos that SpaceX really embraced from the beginning, that they found ways to do things more cheaply, that they found ways to not depend on this large kind of contracting aerospace contractor base. They vertically integrated things themselves, their supply lines and their design systems in order to have total control and try to minimize the cost because they knew they're not getting more money from NASA. And that's now been, you know, that's kind of where we're moving in the space program to see where else that can work. But this was the great success story of doing that for the first time. So they give, the federal government gives money

up front. Do we also give things like access to like bases and pads or other machinery or what, is there anything else, like hardware stuff? Yeah, so NASA in particular has a unique vehicle called a Space Act Agreement that was granted to it when it was created as a way to kind of engage with industry. It's used a lot now as well, but yeah, you can use NASA facilities. NASA has these giant wind tunnels. You can have NASA technical expertise, right? Because NASA wants you to succeed, ideally, right?

They want cheap rockets for themselves as well. But yeah, there's a huge amount of infrastructure that exists. testing facilities, particularly for rocket stands, is a big one. Okay. And then when we think about this from a taxpayer, someone who doesn't pay like a ton of attention to space policy, I can see the argument for saying, like, look, this is a lot of money to give to a private company, but perhaps it's cheaper than if we were to do it all on our own. Would that be a reasonable argument?

Yeah, and that's absolutely correct. So they, so ultimately after this Falcon 9, this kind of workhorse rocket from SpaceX was created, NASA pays, you know, they won the contract to supply the space station. They've, you know, NASA's paid out to SpaceX something like $12 billion in that contract. I think SpaceX says $22 billion. I think they say, well, maybe it's all together. Yeah, it's like NASA, Department of Defense, Space Force, reconnaissance stuff, all that piece. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it is in our, and so the, they have done studies in like a comparable rocket. And, I mean, we've seen this run many times before NASA's past. a comparable rocket through an old classic contracting thing probably would have cost twice as much, if not more, right? And then later. So, you know, SpaceX, we have to be a little careful, though, because SpaceX is a weird outlier, right? Like, it is, we use it as the quintessential example

of commercialization of space, but it's not the average outcome. It is the extreme best-case outcome for a situation like this. It is like a 5-Sigma outlier in terms of how well that they performed. For every SpaceX, there's been a dozen other companies that have gone out of business or produced a much, I mean, the alternative, Northrop Grumman now Orbital Science that created the other launch cargo delivery service to the space station. They never bothered to commercialize it. They never went out of their way to do reusability. They just, they've done

there like 12 flights to the station and they just kind of left it as it is, right? That could have easily been the other outcome here. Like, there's a very... Are we in the situation now where SpaceX is like the only game in town? It is, in fact, yes. So that's the other... That's the rub to all of this, right? Is that, yeah, we've saved some money.

But there are clearly some tradeoffs that we have made as a nation even that access to space is now functionally facilitated by one individual, right? And you could, you mean, it's a company publicly traded technically now, right? But it's still a very tightly controlled public. traded company. There's really no... Because, I mean, in the process of SpaceX's wild innovation, particularly around reusing its launch, its boosters and landing them back and not having

to drag them out of this water and scrape off, you know, all the salt water and, you know, messes things up, it put every other launch company out of business in the United States, which were all kind of teetering on viability anyway. It completely revolutionized the international launch market. Most of the commercial launches, by the time SpaceX came around, were all going to Europe or Russia or India because they were having much cheaper launches than anything offered in the United States. So it kind of single-handedly brought back launch, competitive commercial launch to the United States. But at the same time, no one else has matched them at all, like not even close.

So then when we think about like what the risks are to having no plan B or having no other player, is it possible that SpaceX says, you know what, we have the institutional knowledge now, we have the hardware now, sorry government, you're not paying us enough and they like ratchet up prices? Or is the contracting that exists with them? Does it like prohibit that from happening? It depends what contract it is, but we have seen a steady increase in prices for the Falcon 9. Okay, where they come to the government and say, sorry, this is how much it costs. And we have to say, well, no one else can do this and we can't do this.

So I guess we're going to pay you more. Yeah. I mean, and it goes beyond that even. I mean, you had Elon Musk himself threatened to stop. I mean, they own now the only way to send astronauts to the International Space Station, the United States, right? They made a crew portion of this. Boeing's competitive version of this still hasn't launched successfully. It has serious problems.

And so you had last year when Elon Musk was beefing with President Trump that he threatened to turn off the production lines for the dragon crew capsules and now no astronauts get to the space. He tweeted. This isn't theoretical. He tweeted this out there or posted whatever it is on X. That was true. He could have, I mean, I'm sure maybe they would have nationalized SpaceX at that point. It would have gone kind of this nuclear response.

but he controls access to space for functionally the entire United States and most of the world, actually. What are the international players? What are the other sort of versions that are happening? So China's probably the most comparable. China's been really increasing their investment in space over the last 25 years. They are pursuing their own reusability components. They have their own versions of, you know, quote unquote commercial rocket companies going forward. But they launched 80 times last year or something like that. They're putting a lot of stuff into space, and they're really increasing their capabilities, both scientifically. They have their own lunar program that is kind of moving forward.

They have their own space station now, and their, again, military and kind of national security-wise for them are also putting a lot of investment into that. So that's the most comparable. You have Europe, which has its Arian rockets that are kind of struggling. It's a national or consortium and kind of continental priority for them to maintain their own. on independence of launch. India is kind of the other big player as well. And then you have Russia, which has a decrepit and decaying remnants of their space program and don't have much else going on except for the International Space Station, though they are capable of launching quite a few military systems for themselves. Okay. So we've covered a lot of ground. We haven't got to Mars yet.

Can you tell me why you think Mars sort of came off the table, or is it on the table? Do you feel like because of who's sort of running what we're doing right now, maybe that is going to be the next frontier? I'd like to say Mars is on the table, but I think Mars is further away now than it's been in a long time. And that's ironic considering. Yeah, it's ironic considering because Musk has talked about it, but you can look at the number of times he's mentioned Mars in his tweets, which I have, and they've dropped, as NASA's focused on the moon, and that's kind of where Trump's focus has gone as well. Mars is too far away to pull anything off during his second term. It's, it's,

It is dramatically more difficult to get there and back with humans. Then Elon's pivot towards data centers in space and AI, kind of seeing where the big investment money was coming from. You know, I've kind of joked that, pity the poor SpaceX engineer who joined the company thinking they were going to lead humanity's glorious settlement on another world to now designing data centers to generate, you know, adult material on grok, you know, for people like instead.

So when you say that, you're saying the sort of, like, um, goal is to have like moving orbital in space data centers instead of rural America data centers? That was, SpaceX is big pitch to investors when it went public. And that's their claim that they'll have a $30 trillion market, um, uh,

to access, uh, once they start getting data centers in space. This will betray how little I know about space. But is there ever a worry that we've like put too many things in space? So then like people who are like trying to study it have a hard time seeing it because there's just like a bunch of stuff whizzing through. Yes.

That's, that's a serious issue that's growing. worse by the day. So putting data centers even aside, SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites. These are what's called a mega constellation. They're the largest single satellite operator in the entire world. They have something like 10 or 12,000 satellites. They launch 25 at a time, or was it 60, lots of dozens at a time every two or three days. And other China's doing a version of this. Other companies like Amazon are trying to do their version of this, thousands of things at a time. And yeah, I mean, orbit, so when you're orbiting, you're kind of stuck by basic physics. You have to be traveling at least 17,000 miles an hour in order to not fall back down to the earth.

There's only so many, you know, it's a shared resource above us about where you can fit all these things because you're moving 17,000 miles an hour. You don't want to hit something else moving 17,000 miles an hour, right? If you do, you create millions of debris for people who remember the movie Gravity, right? that is a real thing. Kessler syndrome, worst case scenario, obviously. But it gets even tighter out what they call geo, the geostationary orbits. This is where weather satellites and national kind of security satellites

that they orbit at the same rate that the Earth moves. So they like stay in the same position as the order? I don't know why I made the Earth go like that. But yes, they come with it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. And so, but there's really few. There's only a few thousand slots for things that can sit in that ring.

Who governs that? No one technically governs it. It's all done through kind of international consortiums. And, you know, nominally we have the Outer Space Treaty, which was signed by the U.S. and Soviet Union, most other space-faring nations in 1967. And that's what we still sort of agree under, even though one of the biggest signatories is no longer a political entity? Yes. Yeah. It's all, it's all, that's a good question. I don't know how they kind of resolved it with the collapsed Soviet Union. But Russia, I mean, everyone still kind of abides by it, as pretty basic, and most of it from there on out has been through kind of international consortium integration and planning, right? So it's kind of like with

spectrum, you know, spectrum as a third resource in terms of radio spectrum. Like, you have to allocate certain amounts for certain types of uses. But yeah, so you're a astronomer on the ground, you're looking up with a telescope, and now you're seeing hundreds, if not thousands of little reflective satellites whizzing by you at a rate

you've never had to worry about before. Particularly for if you're looking for things like asteroids that could be coming, you know, in Earth's direction, it makes it much harder to find those. You're doing large sky surveys. You're trying to take big pictures of the night sky. Now you have hundreds of these streaks of light kind of all polluting your, and they also pollutes spectrum.

So they give off radio signals. So that's just going to get worse and worse and worse. And some of these data center concepts that they're promoting, you're talking about huge, you know, hundreds of yards or hundreds of meters long spacecraft, because you have to have these giant radiator panels to give off the heat in space. in order to get rid of all that kind of compute heat. So you're having these very big, which means very bright, large things. And if you make thousands of those, suddenly you're kind of the night sky fundamentally changes.

And so there are a number of night sky consortiums, things led by scientists, but also kind of naturalists, right? People who want a night sky for themselves that are trying to work against this. But it's a tough uphill battle, given how fast some of these companies are moving. And obviously not the most sympathetic licensing regime to stop this kind of stuff. moment. I have two more questions. Question one. For a listener or for someone who doesn't know that much about space policy, what would you say they should do to learn more? Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my own podcast, the space policy edition of planetary radio. Planetary Society, my nonprofit organization that I worked for is all about kind of sharing that kind of activity. There's a great website, space policyonline.com. That is run, it's kind of, it's newsy, but it covers this really well. There are online courses and then there's, you know, some great books that we could recommend that kind of go into the history of some of these things. Do you mean your top three? What are the three books that you like? Let's see. Boy, how do I choose? I'd say this is where I'm going to have to go off the top. I mean, I have all my books behind me.

The heavens and the earth is a great overall history of the kind of the first 10 years, this kind of the up to the Apollo decisions. That's probably the most kind of detailed political science analysis of this period. And that's just so insightful. It's still one of those books that I think still drives a lot of the fundamental discussions in terms of space policy. The other one is called Robots in Space by Howard McCurdy and Roger Launius, which is in some ways somewhat of a dated book, but has an amazing two-thirds overview of the history of robotics. and the relationship of human society to robotics and how they used it, how are they used in space science. And this has, they have great insights about kind of how you look at like how Star

War, a lot of how we talk about robots and space is like this kind of Edwardian servant role, right? You think about like C3P or R2D2 and these kind of weird implications from that in terms of how our own culture interfaces with this. I think that's a really, a really wonderful one. And then I think there are, I mean, boy, where do I even? choose for the third line. I mean, if you want to pick your favorite two, that feels fun. That's like two. I mean, I could keep going on, but it's immediate recall, honestly, is one of my

weaker things off the top of my head. But I'm happy to give you a longer list that you can post with this. Excellent. There's only so much space in the brain. Yeah. Yeah. Again, from the heavens to the earth and robots in space are two, two strong recommendations there. And the last thing I want to ask you is the name of this show is called government that doesn't suck. in your estimation, what sort of grade would you give America's approach to space exploration? Am I including, so I'm going to include science, all of it, the stuff that we didn't talk about as much. Sure. I give it a B plus, frankly.

And we talked a lot about the side that has the most problems with the human space flight side. But again, the side of NASA that sends rovers to Mars that has the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope that are like peering back to just a few hundred thousand years before. after the universe, after the Big Bang. You have missions that study that get closer to the sun, you know, you have to kind of fly through the solar corona. You have missions that are bringing back samples of asteroids that could bring back, you know, potential biosignatures from Mars. I mean, that works incredibly well.

It is a third of what NASA, of NASA's entire budget every year to run over 100 spacecraft from the sun to beyond Pluto. Everything that we know about planets, basically, in terms of how they look and what they act like and showing them as worlds, not just points of light in the sky, is a function of a spacecraft that has been sent there to take pictures and gather data for us. These are just astonishing. These are the things that really motivate me to see more of,

in addition to human spaceflight. I'd love to see more human spaceflight, but we need to have this more balanced approach. So that works incredibly well. It's been really clear with what it does, and it's the part of NASA that has no, all this kind of commercial station, I think maybe one thing that's really important to emphasize here. SpaceX does not build science missions. They're not sending science rovers to Mars. They're not building

space telescopes. Elon Musk himself is not funding a mission to Venus to look for life in its atmosphere. They're not doing that. They could, but they don't. Right. In fact, until two months ago, we had no examples of any philanthropy. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, recently announced he'd build a Hubble-class space telescope. I hope that works. But that would be the first example of its kind ever of that succeeding. And so there is no alternative to this. No one has been willing to do this because the outcomes are uncertain. You don't know what you're going to find.

And, you know, there's a, you know, Jeff Bezos may take his own ride into space, but he's shown no inclination to figure out if life exists beyond Earth, right? Or to study the sun, you know, or the Earth climate itself. So you're saying those pursuits seem to be more in the realm of government. Yeah. And not even seem to be demonstrably. It's like we, there's no, that's what I'm trying to emphasize. There's, the capability now exists.

And ironically, the way that we, politics is talking about funding in terms of taking money away that NASA science is facing a 47%, 46% cut this year. Oh, they want to grow human spaceflight. They're moving public money into the things that private individuals have already demonstrated their interest to fund themselves. anyway and taking it away from the part that no one has shown any interest in funding, that there's no replacement for. And so that's the part that works the best that could do better, could do even more. And that's where I give it, that rounds everything up to a B plus, I think, for space overall. If you think about it's pretty amazing how much we've done. We've spent a lot of time looking at how we got here. But now we want to force you to think about

the future. Where should space exploration go next and who should do it? The options that you have for these questions are NASA, billionaire, or both? Who should be responsible for sending astronauts into orbit? Both, because we need all the options we can get. Okay. Who should be responsible for building a moon base? NASA, because that's a public interest. That's a national interest, and it should not be an individual's whim about what our national outcomes are. Who should be responsible for deflecting an asteroid? Definitely NASA. You don't want to pin that on one person's idiosyncratic attitudes about what an asteroid is or isn't doing? Who should be responsible for mining the moon? I don't want to mine the moon. Not that might be the answer. No one? I mean, look, that billionaires, I mean, let billionaires do that.

That's a, they want to do that and find a way to make money. There is no motivation to do that because the moon doesn't really have anything super useful. Billionaire wants to spend their money figuring that. They're welcome to it. Who should be responsible for rescuing stranded astronauts? Both, because that's a fundamental commitment under the Outer Space Treaty that people who are citizens of the countries who are assigned it are bound to do. Who should be responsible for building the first Mars settlement? I think we've seen a lot in the last few years that suggests that a broad national activity that has lots of ways to have take in feedback and take in democratic inputs would be a preferable way to live on Mars than under the yoke of one individual person who can. controls the air you breathe. Okay, so that's maybe a NASA. Let's call that a NASA. Okay. And then last one here. Who should be responsible for searching for alien life?

I'll say both, but I think we've seen given the option that it's really, NASA's the one that's going to do it. And again, I want a discovery like that to be made public and be shared freely. And that's why we have a public space program, right, to bring everyone along on this and to not hide anything about what we do. What does the private sector do better than NASA? Launch, launching things into space. What should private companies never be allowed to control? Access to space on the behalf of an entire nation. What do space fans refuse to admit about privatization?

That it comes with costs that aren't just money. What do critics of billionaires in space get wrong? That I'd rather them spend their money on going into space than building a fifth yacht. They're not going to do the things you want to do anyway, so you might as well do something interesting with it. What is one plausible space disaster that no one is prepared for? A catastrophic loss of the International Space Station because it's 30 years old almost at this point. And something could happen any day. And that is a massive chunk of metal that would not burn up completely in the atmosphere if it came down.

Oh, so we'd be like getting like little ISS rain on us? And by rain, not little. Olting, fiery, heavy. It's a big issue. We're actually building a spacecraft to de-orbit it. but if anything happens before that point, you don't have any options. Okay. And this is the final question.

50 years from now, will people look back on this time as the moment that the government unlocked space or the moment that the government handed over space to private corporations? Probably the moment when government handed over their control of space to private corporations. Casey, I'm so happy. Casey, you're so good at this because it seems to me that you're like a very committed public servant in the service of science communication, space communication. But I also love the stuff that you're doing about bringing people to Congress, to talk to people, to show them like what it is to have your own political efficacy and pushing things even marginally forward.

It's excellent. Thank you. Very kind. And I was going to say, I think given your background, I can see being particularly interested in that. I think it's, I call space a good starter topic for engaged citizens. Well, it doesn't feel it's not abortion. Yeah. You don't have that kind of partisan.

in rigidity. And so it's an era that you can still kind of go in and just make a good case. And most people, there's no anti-space, you know, group out there trying to undermine you. You're not locked into these, you get into these like human versus science, but most people still like it. Yeah. And that's a really luxurious place to be. And one of the things we get the most from people who do come to our days of action on Congress, or they come out just feeling better about our democracy, which is kind of my sneaky goal with all this, is to just make. better citizens. And it's a good topic to not get bitter on fast, right? So it's a good way to start doing that. Is space expensive? I don't think so. You can take NASA's entire budget history,

everything in the United States is spent on NASA, adjusted for inflation, add it all up and apply it to this year's budget deficit, the single year deficit against the United States spending. And you would just barely cover this one year's deficit from NASA's entire history written out of existence, right? You spend, on every, let's see, you spend NASA's budget every six days or so on Social Security in this country, every 12 days or so on Medicare.

Like, we have our priorities, right? Like, we're spending where we want to spend, which is primarily military and social services. NASA is less than one-third of one percent of our annual expenditures. It is, it, you could, again, you could cancel NASA tomorrow, and it would, our savings in the government

expenditures would round to zero. That sounds like an incredible, bargain. I think so. Casey Dreyer, thank you so much for chatting with me today. I feel like I learned a ton. Good. I could go on and on, and I do it frequently on my podcast, but thank you so much for having me. This is great. Absolutely. That's our episode for today. Be sure to follow along so you can see all the upcoming episodes. As with every episode, we do not push for any specific policy or policy agenda. We merely want to inform you with the facts and history of our time so that you, me, we can do a better job of holding our government accountable. It takes all of us to do this. Government

That Doesn't Suck is hosted by me, Professor Lindsay Cormack, and co-hosted by Professor Greg Jackson. The show is produced by History That Doesn't Suck in association with Pave Studios. Executive producers are Greg Jackson, Dassey McCraugh, and Max Cutler. We are part of the Rewind Network. For more information, go to GTDSPodcast.com. Things are about to heat up. Southern heat. Crispy. Crunchy. sandwich? No. Sushi. Saddle up for something spicy. Introducing the Nashville hot chicken sushi roll by Bento. Find it in a grocery store near you. H-TDS is supported by fans at HGDSPodcast.com slash membership. My gratitude to

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